When Kathleen McCormick ’16 told people that she studied human development, they often responded with confused stares. “You mean psychology?” some asked.

McCormick had earned a bachelor’s degree in human development at Cornell Human Ecology and returned to pursue her doctorate. Yet even she sometimes struggled to articulate a succinct definition of the field, also called human development and family science (or studies). When she cast about for resources detailing the field’s origins and progression, she came up short.  

“If you’re going to have a disciplinary identity, you need to have a disciplinary history,” she said. “I wanted that for human development and family science, and selfishly, I wanted it for myself.”

McCormick decided to help fill that gap. With support from a CHE Graduate Summer Archival Research Fellowship, she spent months digging into the Cornell University Library’s Division of Rare and Manuscript Collections. Her research, amassed in a recent article in Child Development Perspectives, unearths the discipline’s roots and delineates its unique strengths and contemporary challenges.

“My main goal was to have undergraduates read this and say, ‘Oh, this is what human development and family science is, and this is where we come from,” she said. “That felt important to me.”

McCormick discovered that the field traced back to multiple movements in the US: land grant universities, which proliferated after 1862 and emphasized applied work; the study of home economics starting in the late 19th century; and the rise of the child study movement, which applied empirical methods to researching children and adolescents.

A particular strength of human development, McCormick notes in the article, has been its pioneering focus on interdisciplinary work and solving real-world problems. For example, leading figures in the field founded Head Start, the federally funded early childhood education program, and launched research efforts that made key contributions to the understanding of child development, such as the Berkeley Growth Study and the Iowa Child Welfare Research Station. 

“I’m very inspired and get choked up thinking about the people who have come before me and the work they’ve done to better communities,” McCormick said.

Human development also created opportunities for women to undertake groundbreaking science at a time when they faced few opportunities in academia and to study subjects other departments ignored, such as nutrition and children’s health, she discovered.

Still, the field has opportunities to learn from the past and improve, McCormick argues. One challenge she highlights is the lack of a consistent name. The human development department at Cornell, to cite one example, had gone through four titles by the time McCormick was an undergraduate there. In the second year of her doctoral program, it merged with the psychology department.

Frequent name changes “make it hard to find continuity, trace the lineage and make it feel like this is a field that you know or have a kinship with,” she said.

McCormick also points out that the field, which mostly attracts women, is sometimes denigrated as a “mom major” and perceived as insufficiently rigorous, attracting less funding and prestige than departments dominated by men. “It does a disservice to the impactful science that’s going on and is something we need to keep fighting against,” she said.

Understanding the field’s history also involves grappling with the racial discrimination that occurred in all science, but was notable in human development, given its history of allowing entry to groups previously excluded from higher education and science. “In spite of this, the history of HDFS is a history of scientists of color succeeding in spite of discrimination and continued barriers to entry and equitable pay,” she said.

McCormick, whose own research relates to the menstrual cycle, hopes her paper can help propel the field forward. “I hope it can help illuminate the way and be a source of empowerment,” she said. “I want people to be excited to be a member of this field.”